Sawdust and Tinsel

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) directed approximately 45 films during his long career, for almost all of which he was also the screenwriter.  Last winter, the Seattle Art Museum showed, in a weekly series, nine of his best known works -- including the four that made the greatest impact on me as a college student -- The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, and The Virgin Spring.

That still leaves about 36 films yet unscreened, and starting last night SAM began another nine-film series with Sawdust and Tinsel / The Naked Night (1953).  Other well-known films in this year's series are Cries and Whispers and Winter Light.  And two of his more atypical films -- but films appealing to large audiences including myself -- Fanny and Alexander, and perhaps the best film production ever of an opera, Mozart's Magic Flute.

The story or plot of Sawdust and Tinsel is slight.  Albert is the owner and manager of a bedraggled traveling circus whose horse-drawn carriages slog their way across Sweden, from one small town to the next.  The circus doesn't make enough from admission fees to even keep their one animal, a trained bear, from near-starvation.  Albert travels with his lover, Anne, living in a world of mud, sweat, and tears -- and circus performers who struggle at the bottom of their profession. 

Albert is getting up in years, and clearly has had enough of the stress and privation, the humiliations and destitution, that follow his circus wherever it goes.  The circus is headed next for Albert's former home town, where his estranged wife and three young sons live.  He secretly hopes to leave the circus and return to civilized life with the family he had abandoned.  Anne senses that she herself is about to be abandoned, and is hysterical in response.

En route, they lose most of their costumes, and Albert is forced to debase himself before the director of a local theatrical group, begging to borrow some of theirs.  He does no better with his family.  His wife now runs a successful small store and doesn't want him back; his children hardly know him and both fear and dislike him.  Meanwhile, Anne, desperate not to be left alone and penniless, essentially sells herself for a one-night stand with the lead actor from the local company. 

Albert, returning from his wife's rejection, discovers Anne's "infidelity," and challenges the actor to a fight in front of the circus's local audience.  The much younger actor not only crushes him physically, but treats him with contempt in front of his own circus performers and the local citizenry.

In what passes as a Bergman happy ending, Anne -- who had hated the actor who had bought her "services" -- embraces Albert, and the circus pulls out of town.

The story wasn't exciting -- to me, at least -- but the black and white cinematography was striking.  The scenes of the silhouetted circus caravan moving along a ridge, the half-lit Swedish sky in the background, which marked both the beginning and the end of the film, called to mind similar scenes from Bergman's Seventh Seal, released just four years later. 

An interesting early Bergman film, reportedly well received at the time of its release.